CO2 lags an average of about 800 years behind the temperature changes-- confirming that CO2 is not the cause of the temperature increases. One thing is certain-- earth's climate has been warming and cooling on it's own for at least the last 400,000 years, as the data below show. At year 18,000 and counting in our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age, we may be due-- some say overdue-- for return to another icehouse climate!http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

Last edited by Alex123 on Mon Mar 18, 2013 10:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Life is a struggle. Life will throw curveballs at you, it will humble you, it will attempt to break you down. And just when you think things are starting to look up, life will smack you back down with ruthless indifference..."

manas wrote:It's not considered very 'PC' to say what I just said above.

What you said is the epitome of PC.

Ok you finally got me to respond there...

By 'PC' I meant 'politically correct' and that's a term I actually find irritating, so in hindsight I wish I had not used it.

Anyway, what I meant is that, in my experience, individuals who suggest that governments encourage people on a massive scale to even voluntarily have themselves sterilized, for the sake of saving the planet, are usually shouted down with cries of 'you're like the N*zi's!' or other such emotive statements. It is a credit to this forum that no-one has gone off the rails about my suggestion here, though. But then, Buddhists do tend to be more rational than most. But yes, Daniel, in my experience that kind of suggestion is usually shouted down, one reason being that the oligarchs who profit so much from the labour of humble folks like you and I, worry about 'economic growth' declining if we actually abandoned this insane thing called 'growth economics' and attempted sustainability instead. So no, what I said was not 'PC' at all.

I do hope I have not stepped in to a 'minefield topic' here...I don't really enjoy conflict, especially with other Dhamma practitioners...

tiltbillings wrote:This thread is going nowhere the previous climate change thread(s) went. Is there any reason why space here needs to be used here to cover the same ground, using same arguments, influencing no one?

The sceptics want to free the minds of the believers, and the believers want to free the minds of the sceptics. So I think the intention on both sides is good, but as for whether anyone will actually change their point of view, I'm not so sure

tiltbillings wrote:This thread is going nowhere the previous climate change thread(s) went. Is there any reason why space here needs to be used here to cover the same ground, using same arguments, influencing no one?

The sceptics want to free the minds of the believers, and the believers want to free the minds of the sceptics. So I think the intention on both sides is good, but as for whether anyone will actually change their point of view, I'm not so sure

Thanks. My point is that that is ground that has already been plowed and replowed here. I don't see anything new. And if there forums out there devoted solely to this sort of thing.

.

++++++++++++++++This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

There is freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning. If there were not this freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning, then escape from that which is birth, becoming, making, conditioning, would not be known here. -- Ud 80

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.People live in one another’s shelter.

tiltbillings wrote:This thread is going nowhere the previous climate change thread(s) went. Is there any reason why space here needs to be used here to cover the same ground, using same arguments, influencing no one?

The sceptics want to free the minds of the believers, and the believers want to free the minds of the sceptics. So I think the intention on both sides is good, but as for whether anyone will actually change their point of view, I'm not so sure

Thanks. My point is that that is ground that has already been plowed and replowed here. I don't see anything new. And if there forums out there devoted solely to this sort of thing.

I hate to be a party pooper, but despite the allure of arguing about all this stuff, I am noticing that in this debate, members who would normally get along fine are arguing with each other. So this kind of topic seems by it's very nature, to facilitate discord, rather than concord. So, this being a Forum that, in it's wider sense, is devoted to the cultivation and discussion of the Buddha Dhamma, I think I see what you are getting at here.

On the other side, some might conversely state that, as it is taking place in the 'Lounge' section, that that doesn't matter. However, does it actually fit the definition of what the Lounge is for - 'Casual discussion amongst spiritual friends'? Is the discussion casual, or conducive to friendship? I have to admit - and I apologise if I am being a party-pooper, but - I don't think so.

One solution that might please everyone concerned, would be to merge this topic with something called 'The Great Global Warming Debate', where whosoever was inclined could argue indefinitely about these issues. That way, there would be one dedicated place where people could go, and discuss this interesting and concerning issue to their heart's content.

Humans were not pumping out carbon long enough to affect climate which was changing over millions and billions of years. Few decades is too short amount of time to change the overall trend of temperature on Earth.

To judge few decades of weather changing is like trying to predict the outcome of the football game by first 1/100th of a second of action. Too short period of time even if humans did affect the climate....

In the late 70's it seems that we were going into global cooling:

"Life is a struggle. Life will throw curveballs at you, it will humble you, it will attempt to break you down. And just when you think things are starting to look up, life will smack you back down with ruthless indifference..."

manas wrote:One solution that might please everyone concerned, would be to merge this topic with something called 'The Great Global Warming Debate', where whosoever was inclined could argue indefinitely about these issues. That way, there would be one dedicated place where people could go, and discuss this interesting and concerning issue to their heart's content.

That's more or less what I suggested when I suggested to admins that they might merge it with "The New Normal". My main concern, as I said yesterday, is that misinformation should not be allowed to go unchallenged and uncorrected. The situation is simply too serious for that: if we don't (1) realise we have a crisis on our hands and (2) start doing something about it, then tens of millions of people will suffer - most of them the poorest people of developing countries. (There by, the way, is the real connection to the dhamma: compassion.)

I would be quite happy for the whole subject to be permanently banned here, so long as the ban and the end of this thread could be made quite clear on the crucial facts - that AGW is here, it's already affecting millions of people around the world and it will keep on getting worse unless we change our ways.

Kim O'Hara wrote:...I would be quite happy for the whole subject to be permanently banned here, so long as the ban and the end of this thread could be made quite clear on the crucial facts - that AGW is here, it's already affecting millions of people around the world and it will keep on getting worse unless we change our ways.

Kim

Respectfully, Kim, I don't think making such a 'final statement' in favour one side, would be conducive to peace between the disputing factions.

Kim O'Hara wrote:I would be quite happy for the whole subject to be permanently banned here,

You mean any questions that challenge it?

Kim O'Hara wrote:so long as the ban and the end of this thread could be made quite clear on the crucial facts - that AGW is here, it's already affecting millions of people around the world and it will keep on getting worse unless we change our ways.

This is not fair to ban other points of view simply because they don't agree with yours. This just shows the desperation of AGW proponents.

"Life is a struggle. Life will throw curveballs at you, it will humble you, it will attempt to break you down. And just when you think things are starting to look up, life will smack you back down with ruthless indifference..."

Kim O'Hara wrote:...I would be quite happy for the whole subject to be permanently banned here, so long as the ban and the end of this thread could be made quite clear on the crucial facts - that AGW is here, it's already affecting millions of people around the world and it will keep on getting worse unless we change our ways.

Kim

Respectfully, Kim, I don't think making such a 'final statement' in favour one side, would be conducive to peace between the disputing factions.

Equally respectfully, I care about truth more than peace, where we can't have both.

On the one side we have very nearly the whole scientific community -

daverupa wrote:

As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.

On the other side we have Alex, who has shown himself completely willing to repeat and repost the same ill-informed material without ever addressing valid criticisms of it. (Read a few pages of http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6963 and you will see what I mean. Compare the graphs with what he has posted in the last few days, too.)

Somewhere in between we have folk with doubts about AGW for one reason or another but willing - some of them keen - to learn.

I would like to help the in-betweeners, and maybe learn more myself in the process, but Alex creates so much static as to make the thread almost unreadable. In saying all this I am prioritising truth over peace, as I do in the whole thread, but I know it may hurt some people's feelings. Mods: If there is a better venue for this meta-discussion, by all means move it there.

This chart shows temperatures over hundreds of millions of years. The industrial revolution has only been affecting the atmosphere for about one millionth of that time scale. This chart is totally irrelevant to the discussion. If global temperature changes 20 degrees over a millions years, lifeforms will evolve / migrate to adapt to the change. But if global temperature changes 20 degrees in ten years, there would be a mass extinction event. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

polarbuddha101 wrote:Also, we happen to be coming out of an ice age so warming is to be expected.

Yeah we're coming out of an ice age and into the heat age and global warming is speeding the heat age up faster into the too hot to live in age. Also, I really don't know what ice age scientists are talking about. The real ice age was a long time ago. I wouldn't say that there's another ice age happening. The real ice age was when everything was covered in ice way back in the real ice age 20,000 years ago. The only reason why they still call this the ice age is because Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist. In an ideal world that ice should probably exist no matter what. However because of global warming they have less time to stick around.

The Earth does not have a basement full of blueprints for "how it should be". Earth just is how it is. What matters for biological life is that when change happens, we need it to be gradual enough for us to adapt to those changes so that life may continue.

danieLion wrote:Humans have been on the scene approximately 10,000 years. The planet is approximately 4.5 billion years young. 10,000/4.5 billion equals 0.00000222222 which equals not enough information.

But it's worse that that. We've only have discrete statistical clilmatology measurements (not inferences) for about the last 150 years. 150/4.5 billion equals 0.000000033.

That ratio is meaningless. How does 10,000 / 4.5 billion relate to any scientific point about climate change?

Here is the ratio that really matters if you want to talk about sample size: We have been spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and clearing forests on a massive scale for only a couple hundred years. We have reliable climate data for a statistically significant time before this period.

Compared to unusually cold period called "ice age", yes. But not compared to more usual temperatures.

The temperature on the dial isn't what really matters. What matters is how fast it's changing right now. The rate of change of temperature right now is off the charts. To see this you would need a different time scale than the graph you love so much. That chart shows 600 million years since the Cambrian explosion, includes five mass extinction events and several other smaller extinction events, and life evolved from little globs in the ocean to massive dinosaurs, died back to little rat-like creatures, and evolved into humans. The wide temperature fluctuations you are looking at happened over millions of years, giving life time to adapt and / or migrate to more fitting regions.

Last edited by Buckwheat on Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

polarbuddha101 wrote:So what's more important, stopping deforestation and planting new trees or somehow banishing SUVs from this earth and taxing companies extra for their carbon emissions? (not that they're mutually exclusive, just wondering what people think is more important, protecting the biosphere through conservation or reforming human use of resources)

Maybe I'll make this a new topic and anyone else is of course free to start it as well. That might actually be constructive

You are absolutely right that protecting biosheres in their natural state is the highest priority. However, the whole point of reducing our impact is to preserve those biospheres, so you are making a false dichotemy. They go hand in hand.

In another post by Alex, he cited that humans are adding 3.76% more CO2, than the natural emission of earth processes. 3.76% of any Earth process is no chump change. In fact, I'm a little shocked at how high that number is.

As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,[103] no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.[10][11]

As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement,[103] no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.[10][11]

Even the Oil companies are getting on board...

They are voting with their feet and chequebooks, too, actively taking out exploration leases in areas that would normally be under Arctic ice year-round. They know they will have access. They must know why they will have access. And still the greedy lying bastards* go ahead and do their utmost to increase the damage they are doing.